Dealing with stress in uncertain times.

1. Regularly stop the physical effects of the stress response. Use these audios to help or you can do regular daily exercise. Use these audios to help

2. Boost your own positive resources. When we are stressed, negatives inhibit positive, resourceful feelings. So things that should make you feel confident, resourceful, enthusiastic and happy, just don’t. Audio Spotify or Apple Music

3. Focus on your long term goals on a regular basis. They haven’t changed. See the article Set Goals for Success in this blog.

4. Set short term goals, and regularly focus on them like above. How are you going to eat healthily? Are you going to exercise? How often? Set targets for the week ahead and maintain your discipline.

5. Update any skills or identify new ones that you can use in the future. Can you do this online?

6. Keep going. There will be an end to all of this uncertainty, even if it is not clear at the moment. When it comes, you will be ready to take whatever opportunities present themselves.

Creative Thinking

I like to consider thinking as being on a sliding scale of externally focused and internally focused thinking. External thinking deals primarily with our surroundings and is involved more in logic, analysis, evaluation, calculation, spatial awareness and mostly unemotional, rational thinking processes.

For example, if you plan to cross a road you would assess what traffic is on the road, how faraway it is, how fast it is travelling and how quickly and safely you can move to cross the road. Similiarly, if you were surfing, or playing football or trying to catch a bus, your thinking would be primarily external logical and analytical.

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Pavlov’s Dogs – controlling emotional thinking

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In the early 1900s, Russian Physiologist Ivan Pavlov, measured the saliva that dogs produced when he brought them food, as their bodies prepared to digest the food. Then for a while he rang a bell at the same time he brought the food. Then he rang the bell but did not bring food.  The dogs produced saliva exactly as if he had brought them food. In other words an unconscious physiological response was produced to stimulus that would not have normally produced that response.

This is called a conditioned response and usually happens to us more powerfully with bad or fearful things. These responses can be very specific. One lady got terrified when she heard drinking glasses clink together because it reminded her of the start of an earthquake.

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Emotional Thinking for everyday, stress and performance enhancement.

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Emotional thinking is part of everyday life, whether it be related to work, family, finances, school or sport. Yet often people feel like it is working against them. Negatives seem to affect us effortlessly, whilst it can be difficult to counteract them even for resourceful, confident people.

There are 4 things to remember about emotional thinking.

1.     Negatives get stuck more powerfully than positives because they are related to fear and survival. (see Mental Strength  in the Healthy Habits Blog on this website).

2.     Negatives inhibit and turn down the effect of positive emotions. This means that when you are stressed, things that should make you happy, confident and resourceful, seem weak and ineffective.

3.     You can’t influence emotional thinking with logical, analytical thinking. Phrases like snap out of it, there’s nothing to worry about, just get on with it and pull yourself together don’t have much impact.

4.     Simple Pavlovian Conditioning techniques ( see Healthy Habits Blog article  Pavlov’s Dogs) allow us to anchor and enhance positive emotional thinking to counterbalance negative fearful emotional thinking.

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The Spectrum of Awareness

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One of the many beautiful features of the human brain is the diversity and capacity to adapt to a constantly changing environment.

There is a spectrum of awareness, from a fully external orientation and awareness of everything that surrounds us, to an internally focused daydreaming state, where can lose ourselves in imagination.

Practising the skill of consciously moving through this spectrum from an external focus to a daydreaming, internal focus has many benefits:-

  1. It switches off the stress response.

  2. It enhances recovery and repair of tissues (healing).

  3. It boosts the immune system.

  4. It opens up creativity and imagination.

  5. It feels really really good !!!

I have described it here. Practise this skill as often as you like.

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Mental Strength – Which Tool Do You Need?

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Many people talk about Mental Strength as though it is one simple skill or character trait.

If you are strong enough mentally, you can just grit your teeth and get on with it and get to the other end in one piece (more or less).

You are mentally tough or you’re not.

Come on.

Just do it.

Grit your teeth.

Suck it up.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

 In reality, as usual, nothing is quite that simple.

One very good reason not to use your phone as a babysitter.

With the increasing use of mobile technology there has been increased concern over the possible harmful effects of screen lighting on children’s health. This has focused on the potential adverse impact on the sleep cycle, with nocturnal disturbance from the bright lights.

More recently there have been concerns regarding brain development, particularly in children under 2 years of age, who are exposed to mobile technology lighting.

The following story highlights another issue with allowing children easy access to this technology.

Why Negative Emotions linger longer

Negative emotions linger longer. Why?

 Why is it that negative emotions and feelings are so hard to get rid of?  They pop into our minds intrusively and regularly without any sort of encouragement and make us feel bad, often when we are trying to relax, interrupting sleep, appetite and other pleasurable activities.

On the other hand, pleasant, happy and positive emotions and feelings are much more transient, disappearing quickly and easily, even though we would like to hold on to them.

Why does low Carb lose weight?

Carbohydrate foods like rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, fruit and sugary drinks have sugar as their basic building blocks. These foods are digested and absorbed, raising the blood sugar level. This stimulates a hormone called insulin which clears excess sugar from the bloodstream and facilitates it’s storage as energy in the form of fat. Insulin blocks the release of fat from our fat stores. Having a low amount of dietary carbohydrate allows the insulin levels to stay low enough to allow fat burning and weight loss if desired.

How to get to sleep now!

When you are dreaming, your brain produces chemicals which take you into deep sleep. Then, after a certain amount of deep sleep your brain produces chemicals which take you into dreaming sleep. This allows you to cycle through the stages of sleep and usually happens several times per night.

If you learn how to mimic dreaming sleep, your brain produces the same chemicals and eases you into deep sleep

What are you exercising for?

It is clear that exercise is good for you, but what are you trying to achieve?

Weight loss? General Fitness? Running a marathon? Dragon Boat Racing? Boxing? Triathlon?

If you want to lose weight as your primary goal, fat burning requires oxygen. This means much less intense exercise than it takes to train for a Triathlon. If you train at the wrong pace you won’t achieve your fitness goals efficiently, no matter how hard you work.

Introduction

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Hi, my name is Gerry Flynn. I have been a doctor since 1982, and in that time I have seen a lot of sick people of all ages. Doctors are usually trying to help sick people get better, but we also come to understand what people can do, or stop doing, to maximise their health for as long as possible.

Obviously our genes play a massive role in how healthy we are but there are aspects of daily living which can dramatically shorten and also reduce the quality of our lives, and these aspects can be changed.

Diet, exercise, sleep and emotional thinking are often the source of many of the problems that affect healthy living, and are all open to small but effective change which can improve health and wellbeing significantly.

It seems that a blog is an effective and easy way of presenting useful information for healthy living in a straightforward manner.